Well, I can't say I'm surprised: Adobe has decided to get ugly at Microsoft for trying to incorporate a "Save as PDF" function into its latest Office Suite. Yeah, I know for Microsoft haters this must seem like fried SPAM with honey (delicious, btw), but it just goes to show that you really can't trust any "open" standard controlled by a corporation. Adobe's attitude here is pure poison for the PDF as a universal format. I wrote about this subject in my dissertation and was lambasted for my comments about Adobe, who I warned was no more interested in "open" standards than Microsoft or Apple.
This news should raise at least a yellow alert among all the thousands of librarians and document archivists working with the PDF format. Indeed, the moment I read this announcement, I heard the PDF's death knell begin to ring.
keeping the standard
Some of the discussion at Slashdot raises the most likely concern of Adobe: that MS will bastardize the standard. I have read second hand (but have not verified) that the license allows use of the standard but not modification. What you want to bet that that Adobe is just making sure that MS doesn't produce a pdf version that is about as compliant to Adobe's standard as MS products are to XHTML and CSS I don't think any of us want MS forking the standard to any degree, no matter how minute.
So I'd wait 'til all the facts come out before passing judgment. So far it just seems we are getting MS's complaint.
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Charlie | cyberdash
Adobe and Microsoft Headed to Court?
According to this post on Technology News things could be getting even uglier. I thought the same thing about MS bastardizing PDF--adding proprietary features that only work in Word, etc.--but it looks like the problem is more mundane: "Adobe may feel such a feature poses a threat to its Acrobat software, a paid version of which enables users to do the same thing." Oh, woohoo. As far as I'm concerned, Adobe and Microsoft deserve each other like a nefarious couple in a film noir.
will OO get sued too?
I haven't used it, but doesn't Open Office have a save as .pdf option that does what MS proposes to do? Is Sun going to get sued over that since it's free? Is it a bad thing that MS is building in security that irks symantec and file conversion that irks adobe? I guess those folks (symantec and adobe) may want to keep their market base, maybe so they have the revenue to keep improving their products, but something tells me that's not their primary concern.
bradley || bleckblog.org
not likely
OO has it and Mac OS X. Doesn't sound like Adobe is interested in going after them or they would have already. I'd be looking for reasons particular to MS as to why this is happening.
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Charlie | cyberdash